1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print system, a print server and a print control method, and more particularly to a recovery method for recovering a print job in a redundant print server, and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
With a conventional print system including a plurality of servers, it is necessary to control the order of printing, and thus a single server is given responsibility for print data generation processing and print job management for each printer. This configuration, however, requires print data to be saved in a common database or the like in order to perform print job recovery in another server in the event of the occurrence of a failure in the server that is responsible for printer management. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2013-008155 discloses a method in which print data is retracted into another server upon shut-down of the OS so that the other server that has retracted the print data can take over to continue the processing.
This related art technique works well if the OS is normally shut down, but if the retraction of print data fails, such as for example, if the OS is abruptly shut down by an accident or a service in the print server is abruptly shut down, it is not possible to continue print processing. In addition, with a print system that supports high volume-printing, there is a possibility that if a shared database is heavily accessed in order to, for example, write print data when saving print data into the shared database, data writing creates a bottleneck for the practical use of the print system. Also, if a failure occurs after printing has started and another server continues the print processing, a problem of making duplicated printouts occurs.